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Archive for category IE

IE9 Chakra JavaScript Team Hosting a Q&A Session Tomorrow

Nov 17

Posted by Web Design CLuj in Browsers, Front Page, IE, Microsoft, WEB 2.0 | No Comments

The IE9 team announced that they’ll be hosting an open Q&A session via Twitter where developers can ask questions to the Chakra engineers about the new JavaScript engine.

In conjunction with the release of Platform Preview 7, we wanted to give the community the opportunity to ask questions of some of our IE and Chakra engineers. So we’re going to host a 2-hour Q&A chat on Twitter tomorrow morning beginning at 9am PST.

They’ll be fielding questions starting tomorrow Thursday, November 18th from 9-11am PST and you can participate by sending your questions to @ie and using the hashtag #ie9.

Check out the blog post for full details of the Q&A session.

Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

A Call for “Pinning Menus” Sanity

Oct 8

Posted by Web Design CLuj in Front Page, IE, WEB 2.0 | No Comments

One of the unique new features of Internet Explorer 9 is the ability to 'pin' web sites to the Windows task bar:

While this feature is cool, the way to do it is to use the META tag and drop in some fairly grotty markup into your page:

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
  1.  
  2. <!-- C-razy IE9 stuff -->
  3. <meta name="application-name" content="Ars Technica"/>
  4. <meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="http://arstechnica.com/"/>
  5. <meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades"/>
  6. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=News;action-uri=http://arstechnica.com/;icon-uri=http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico"/>
  7. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Features;action-uri=http://arstechnica.com/features/;icon-uri=http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-features.ico"/>
  8. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=OpenForum;action-uri=http://arstechnica.com/civis/;icon-uri=http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-forum.ico"/>
  9. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=One Microsoft Way;action-uri=http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/;icon-uri=http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-omw.ico"/>
  10. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Subscribe;action-uri=http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/;icon-uri=http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-subscribe.ico"/>
  11.  

Via Kroc Camen comes a call for sanity. Kroc argues that the IE 9 team should just use the HTML5 <menu> element and get rid of all that META tag nonsense:

Microsoft, if you want a way to declare a context-menu in HTML in a browser-agnostic way that is both forward and backwards compatible use HTML5’s <menu> element! Even IE6 supports it without any hacks because it was part of HTML4 and thus, not an anonymous element.

As browser UI begins to converge and websites become more and more integrated into the OSes we use, the menu element is there to describe native toolbars, menus and context menus that the user-agent could expose. It would thus make sense to use this to specify the jump lists as it can easily expand in capabilities in the future and it’s way easier for other vendors to get on board with than the horrible hack that was favicon.ico.

Example proposed usage of the <menu> tag to achieve IE 9 pinning:

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
  1. <!doctype html>
  3.         <title>Ars Technica</title>
  4.         <meta charset="utf-8" />
  5.         <meta name="ms-application-jumplist" content="jump" />
  6.         <style>
  7.                 #jump   {display: none;}
  8.         </style>
  9. </head>
  11.         <menu id="jump" type="context"
  12.               label="Ars Technica" title="Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades"
  13.         >
  14.                 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/">
  15.                         <img src="http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico" /> News
  16.                 </a></li>
  17.                 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/features/">
  18.                         <img src="http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-features.ico" /> Features
  19.                 </a></li>
  20.                 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/civis/">
  21.                         <img src="http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-forum.ico" /> OpenForum
  22.                 </a></li>
  23.                 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/">
  24.                         <img src="http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-omw.ico" /> One Microsoft Way
  25.                 </a></li>
  26.                 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/">
  27.                         <img src="http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump-menu/jump-subscribe.ico" /> Subscribe
  28.                 </a></li>
  29.         </menu>
  30. </body>
  31.  

Looks nice to me.

Chrome Frame is out of Beta!

Sep 22

Posted by Web Design CLuj in Chrome, Chrome Frame, Front Page, Google, IE, WEB 2.0 | No Comments

Big news: Chrome Frame is now stable and out of beta!

Today, we’re very happy to take the Beta tag off of Google Chrome Frame and promote it to the Stable channel. This stable channel release provides our most polished version of Google Chrome Frame to date, allowing users to access modern web technologies like HTML5 on legacy browsers. You now can download the stable version of Google Chrome Frame and users of the Beta will be automatically updated to it in the days ahead. If you’re an IT administrator, we’ve also posted an MSI installer for deploying Google Chrome Frame in your network.

Chrome Frame is now much faster and stable. It's extremely simple to have a site use Chrome Frame:

PLAIN TEXT
HTML:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
 

For the next step the Chrome Frame team is focusing on making start-up speed even faster and removing the need for administrator rights when installing the plug-in.

Congrats to the Chrome Frame team!

[Disclosure: Alex Russell, the chipper-looking fellow in the video, and I have worked together at Google and on Dojo before.]